Life as an Idol
by za
Summary: The memoirs of one Jack Fairy...Part two is up and it's much more interesting, trust me.
1. In Which I Discover I Am Not Alone

Title: Life as an Idol

Chapter One: In Which I Discover that I Am Not Alone

Author: mao

Disclaimer: Velvet Goldmine characters, likenesses, and plotlines belong to Todd Haynes, Michael Stipe, and the rest of those crazy kids. I'm making no money off this (at least, not that I know of), nor do I get (or claim) credit for any of that stuff. Suing me will accomplish nothing. So there. :P

Author's Notes: This is written as a memoir for Jack Fairy, about whom so little is known. I figured...let's learn more about him! So here we are. 

Warnings: Some violence, homosexuality.

***

My story begins in Manchester. In 1941, my mother, a Polish refugee from the Nazis, made her way across Europe to Britain, where she ran out of money, settling in Manchester. It was there that she began working in one of the many airplane factories that had sprung up since the war started. My mother was a small woman, trim, with long blonde hair always pulled back into a prim, braided bun. Her family had, apparently, had quite a lot of money back in Poland, and she was used to much more lavish surroundings than the tiny flat she shared with a few other young women from the factory. 

It was several years later, when the war was over, that she met my father. He was an Irish soldier who'd spent quite a lot of time fighting in Warsaw and almost a year in Gdansk after his leg was wounded. He was nearly fifteen years older than her, but he receieved a large pension from the government for the loss of half his leg and was back to his previous job as a mathematics professor at Oxford - a position she knew would bring her prestige and a tidy sum every month. 

She courted him furiously - to this day, I have an image of her whispering things in his ears, naughty things in Polish so no one else might understand them - and in less than six months, he'd brought her up to Oxford, where they were wed in a small ceremony. 

In the photo of my parents afterwards, two things become very clear. Firstly, is my mother's level of commitment to him - I was to be born five months later, and it's quite obvious in the picture, if you look closely, that my father may well have married her out of guilt. Secondly, is my mother's triumph as she looks at my father. He didn't look as though he'd ever had much conviction - his hair was carroty red and wispy, receding from his hair line inches more every year. With the loss of most of his right leg, there wasn't much he could do, even with a wife.

He was tied down, and he knew it, if you look at the picture.

So I was raised in Oxford. My mother was able to have a silver teaservice, nice dresses, and a maid to come and cook and clean. She had a small silver snuff-box, though the habit had long since gone out of fashion, and it was always stocked. 

I was born in early 1947, and my parents were never able to have another child, though they tried often. Although it was clear early on that this had been a marriage of convenience more than one of love - my father needed help without his leg, and my mother needed money - it becomes clear, looking over their letters and my memories, that as they got older, they fell in love with one another.

Perhaps part of it came from my mother's stubborn refusal to learn English. She honestly believed that Polish was a superior language and so learned only enough English to be able to go to market every few days. There were enough Polish ex-patriots and refugees in the area that she was able to make friends and have ladies over for tea, as she liked - whilst being able to not invite those she didn't like.

So I was brought up speaking Polish as well as English, and my father would take me with him to his office some days. I loved the wood panelling of it, the thick leather on his chair, the smell of paper and books and chalk that filled the tiny room. When we'd go into his classroom, the boys there would all smile and tease me affectionately.

I remember when I was about five, a boy with yellow hair who smiled at me every time I came with my father to work. He'd copy down his notes furiously, and when he left the room, tell my father, "I want a little boy just like that someday, Professor Malmgren," and my father would beam as the boy winked at me.

When I was six, my parents enlisted me in school. It was a private school, near the Uni, so the thought was if there were any problems of any kind, my father would be right there to take care of me, as my mother would be no help whatsoever. 

The first week or so, no one noticed me. I sat in the middle of the classroom, as alphabetical order dictated, and thought about fairy tales, dragons and knights lancing their way across the room. When the teacher would call on me to answer a question (a raised eyebrow and gentle, "John?"), I would jolt to attention, sometime with the answer, sometimes without.

I found myself doodling in the margins of my workbook. I drew dragons with fire licking out of the mouths like a great many tongues; beautiful white horses for a knight to ride; myself in a bed like Snow White's, a thin layer of glass over my body to protect me. I started drawing the knight a few days later, and before I'd even thought about it, he took on the face of the yellow-haired boy, the one who'd winked at me. 

He winked at me again now, from between two thin blue lines on the paper. I felt myself blushing at what I'd drawn, in the middle of the classroom (squished between Lambeth and Mott), and began a new picture, this time of the knight with the yellow hair - my prince, I decided - entering the magic castle.

I kept drawing these pictures for weeks on end. September ended and October began, cloudy and windy. As the weeks passed, I drew more pictures of the knight rescuing me from towers, from bogs, from the clutches of an evil wizard (who took on the face of a slight boy named Tommy across the room). At the end of every adventure, he would kiss me and hold me tight, and these pictures I kept private, in my pocket. They gave me a secret thrill, deep in the pit of my stomach. 

It was the second week in October when someone - I'll never know who - saw these pictures and told someone else and soon - too soon for me to understand it - it was all over school that Johnny Malmgren likes to kiss boys.

I held out until the first week of November before they cornered me. Perhaps after that time I'd gotten sloppy, but I doubt it - I think my luck had just, finally, run out. After the maths lesson, they'd cornered me in the playground, shouts of "Get the fairy!" and "We'll teach you, bleedin' woofter!" encircled me, and then there they were (all of them, from different grades), hitting me, kicking me, knocking me into the gutter. 

I felt each hit - and they were mostly little boys, understand, none of them were older than nine - and knew I'd be bruised tomorrow. I could feel my lips split when a particularly fat kid punched me in the face, and I tucked myself into a fetal position, any sense of dignity gone. 

I will always be glad that bell rang when it did, as I felt at that moment I'd split my skin and die if it carried on any longer. I heard the bell ring - a loud, wonderfully resonant sound - and they all got up as one, ran back to the building, as I lay there in the muck, thanking God and whomever else might be listening, for that small grace. 

I watched them run back into the building, and as I turned my head, I saw something glinting in the cracks of the pavement. I waited until I couldn't hear anymore shouting, any more little boy's voices, and then I began picking at the grime around the gold thing in the crack. I rubbed at it, prised it out of the muck, and found in my hand the most wonderful piece of jewellry I've ever seen, even since.

It was a golden pin, with a green glinting stone, the crevices black with the muck it'd been lying in for God only knows how long, and when I looked into it, I found myself pulled in. Hyponotised into a glittering golden and green world, with trees that dripped fruit all year round and knights would happily rescue me and kiss me afterwards.

I walked the whole way home, in the middle of the day, yet no one seemed to notice. I crept into my house only to discover that my mother was out to tea and the maid busy in the kitchen. I walked through the gloomy, unlit halls to my mother's room, where I found myself in front of her mirror, uncertain how I'd gotten there.

I looked at myself, and for the first time in maybe an hour, maybe two, I was very aware. There was a cut on my lip, and the blood - thick, red, rich - was oozing slowly out. I put a finger to it, wincing at the delicate pain working its way back into my face, and gently lowered it back to my lip.

Fairy, they'd called me. And this one: Woofter.

There were names for boys like me, I realized as I spread the blood across my lip, thinking of my mother's rouge. If there were names for boys like me, we weren't normal.

But there were more of us.

And what did that mean, anyway? Boys like me. 

Fairy.

Woofter. 

I slid the back of the pin into my lapel and looked at myself in the mirror, then smiled. 

With the rouge-like blood on my lips, I was beautiful. And someday, they'd all understand that too.


	2. In Which I Meet Madam Djzeidjz

Title: Life as an Idol

Chapter Two: In Which I Meet Madam Djzeidjz

Author: mao

Disclaimer: I take no credit for the creation of the character of Jack Fairy, the other characters from the film, their likenesses, or the original plotlines – just for the backstory explaining Jack, his personality, his motivations, and the characters surrounding that. I am making no moolah off this – if I were, I wouldn't be posting it for free on the internet, now would I?

Author's Notes: Sorry this took so long, but I was lacking motivation because I got little feedback. If this totally sucks, please have the balls to tell me so I can fix it or scrap the project, ok? No love, that's what I get…gumble grumble gripe gripe. Besides, I promise it'll get more interesting. I do, in fact, have a plan.

Warnings: He's gay, so guess. Also: language.

***

The next day, my mum and I caught a cab and headed across town to a rather imposing Tudor-style house in the center of the city. It had a verdant garden in front, the view of the house blocked by luxurious trees in a neighborhood where none of the other homes had even grass, let alone trees, shrubs, or the lusch pink and red rosebushes that grew up around the dark molding on the front windows. 

We got there at teatime, and sat in a faded sitting room decorated in delicate pink velvet and yellowing ivory lace. My mother politely sipped cheap, milky tea from an ivory cup with pink flowers about the rim while I quietly munched a chocolate biscuit like a good boy as we waited. 

"Who are we here to see?" I asked Mum, but she just shushed me and looked at the paper cuttings on the walls. I asked again, my voice whining, curious.

"You'll see in a moment Jendric," she told me, using her pet name for me, and I sat still on the tired sofa. I was well into a second biscuit – taking tiny, polite bites, nibbling as quietly as I knew how – when Madam Djzeidjz made her entrace. 

Madam Djzeidjz was a bizarre, Miss Havishamesque character. She wore only black, as opposed to an ancient wedding gown, and during our whole visit she did hardly anything but smoke cigarette after endless hand-rolled cigarette. Although my mother had taught me it was rude to stare, I peeked up under my fluffy bangs to watch her as she sat slowly, removed a cigarette from a flat silver case, followed by a match from a similar silver case, and lit first the match (a single scratch on the edge of the silver teaservice tray), then the cigarette. 

"Claudette," she said to the maid, "Open the window. We don't want to suffocate the boy and his mother." I would later find out that she had spent some time in Paris during the war, during which she had an affair with a high-ranking official. She knew all these things about France's defense during the war while it was happening, and had since developed an utter loathing for the French, thinking them a ridiculously stupid bunch of people. 

Naturally, this had led her to hiring a French staff, as she assumed they would be too stupid to steal from her.

"So this is the boy?" She said to my mother, switching effortlessly from French to Polish, exhaling a plume of smoke, and whipping a pair of thin-rimmed silver spectacles onto her nose simultaneously. She examined me carefully, and I kept my eyes on the floor, flicking them up every so often to get a glimpse of this strange woman. 

She had silvery blonde hair that gave away nothing of her age, all piled loosely atop her head in an imitation of a Victorian Gibson style, and she wore delicately applied cosmetics, making it difficult to see how old she might be. Any bags and wrinkles she may have had were concealed, discguised, or convinced they were something else. She was dressed in a black evening gown, as she always was, and, as it was just after five, she'd put on all her diamonds – she fairly shone in the weak afternoon light, every inch of her it seemed, sparkling whereever a single glint of light hit her.

She examined me closely, puffing away on her cigarette, then, just as quickly as she'd pulled out her spectacles, she put them away and asked my mother to tell her about me. She spoke not another word for the rest of our visit, simply puffed at her cigarette and allowed my mother to speak (which she proceeded to do, at great length) about my talents, how precocious I was, and my love of music. 

Madam Djzeidjz, I should explain, was a teacher. Though she'd never been married she'd been, as she would tell me years later, much "lived with" by various men. It was by virtue of her age and status in society (read: how much money she had) that she was called "Madam" and not simply "Miss." She'd been quite notorious in Poland in the thirties, and when the war started she'd done quite a lot of work with the Polish Resistance Army before fleeing. As I would find out (again, years later as I was only six at this time), she'd been the woman responsible for my mother's flight from the country – otherwise it was quite likely she would have been killed.

In other words, though it was a bit pretentious of my mother to ask for help now – namely, tutoring me – Madam Djzeidjz had a vested interest in my success.

And so Mum rambled on and on, listing my accomplishments, embellishing my talents and interests, doing her best to make me sound good as I sat there wondering what I should do with my rather sticky, chocolatey fingers. Silent, Madam Djzeidjz handed me a napkin and puffed on her cigarette.

And so it was that I began going to her house every day instead of the private school. For the first few years, I continued the basic education every child receives – I learned arithmetic, writing, French, history, basic science. I learned to draw, to paint, to play the piano.

That turned out to be my great talent. It was several years later, shortly after my fourteenth birthday, that Madam Djzeidjz took me off the main course of study.

"This bullshit is alright for everyone else," she told me, puffing away. "You need to do what makes you happy. You need to make music, Jack," she told me. She was the first person ever to call me that, and I loved the way it rolled off her tongue, the rest of her sentances thick with her accent but that one word – "Jack" – bitten off, precise, and completely British. 

I loved the way it sounded rolling off her tongue like that. It was more playful than my name, more distinctive…I couldn't figure out what about it exactly I adored so much, but there was something new and different about being called Jack instead of John. At first, I thought I might ask my mother to call me Jack as well, to bring it up to my parents as a viable option, I just loved the idea of becoming a new person with a different name so much.

But I could see the expression Mum would give me – the way her nose would wrinkle, how she'd laugh and say, "Really, Jendric," in such a way as to make it clear that this would never happen. 

I still drew constantly. If I wasn't playing the piano, plunking out little melodies of my own, I was drawing. Only now, instead of little childish doodles on the edges of my workbooks, my sketches took shape in charcoal on expanses of fresh white paper. I'd color them sometimes with watercolor and kept them in a drawer of  my desk, hidden from view. 

I continued drawing and painting fairy tale versions of my life and even now – eight years later – I continued using the well-worn, horribly faded of the blond boy from my father's classroom as the inspiration for my prince. His hair took on the sheen of straw in moonlight, his skin as pale as my mother's china plates, his eyes the deepest brown I could make by mixing all my paints. I painted the cleft in his chin delicately, the pale freckles on his nose nearly invisible as the paint I used to keep them so light was mostly water. 

I didn't show these paintings to anyone, even though I realized, as I looked at them later, that they were technically quite brilliant, if the content a little controversial. Just the same, Madam Djzeidjz pushed me to work more on the piano than on my watercolors, and so it came to be that I played four, five, sometimes six straight hours a day, warming up with Chopin, practicind Mozart, and then plunking away on my own for a while, making up melodies and harmonies as I went, one corner of my mind always thinking ahead a measure, a line, to the next page of what I might want to play.

Often, Madam Djzeidjz would have people over for tea during our lessons. I spent a lot of time observing her during these visits. She still smoked constantly, one cigarette after another, lighting them all with a wooden match, pulling them from her silver cigarette case, which she would then place delicately on the end table. 

She rarely spoke during these visits. I was not allowed to speak; it would have been bad manners for a boy of my age to say anything, as children were to be seen and not heard. She, however, as the hostess, was very ususual. She'd greet her guests with a polite smile and a nod of the head, sweeping her skirts out so she could sit delicately, perched on the edge of her faded loveseat. 

She would say nothing through most of the visit, but her guests never seemed to notice – they'd talk and talk, babbling on and on about the most inane topics such as the weather or price of beans at the market. They'd continue on, nattering in horrified voices about the state of the world until she'd stub out a cigarette, light another, and exhale smoke towards the ceiling with the words, "Let's listen to Jack play the piano now."

Her guests would politely close their mouths as I played song after son, whatever I wished from piano concertos to versions of popular songs that had been rewritten for the piano, and on and on until it was time for them to leave. At that time, Madam Djzeidjz would stand, smile at them and, lighting another cigarette, sweep out of the sitting room. They would pick up their things and leave, silent. 

Afterwards, Madam Djzeidjz would always give me one of her cigarettes and we'd smoke together in silence. It was from her that I learned the cardinal rule to being mysterious, the one rule that would later be called (in a major magazine – you know the one – no less) the Rule of Cool: Keep quiet and smoke your cigarette.


End file.
